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Apple THIS is what we WANT
- Thread starter mcman77
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I am equally amused at people who don't realize the difference between someone who attempts to speak for everyone and someone who voices their own personal opinion
I don't feel the need to add weight to my personal choices and opinions by claiming everyone else is on my side
My choices and opinions are my own and stand on their own
I'm thinking that in order for a notebook to have a good user experience, it needs a full-size keyboard -- that is, the minimal size is the 11 inch Air. Anything smaller and you get a cramped netbook with tiny keys. But the optimal screen size for a tablet is around 9.5-10 inch. I believe an 11 inch tablet is a bit too large to hold comfortably in your hand. So a tablet / notebook hybrid would compromise usability one way or other -- either it's too small to be a good notebook or too large to be a good tablet.
Not to say some people, maybe even many people, don't have a use for a too-small notebook or too-large tablet. But I personally would rather carry both an Air and an iPad than compromise either way.
Not to say some people, maybe even many people, don't have a use for a too-small notebook or too-large tablet. But I personally would rather carry both an Air and an iPad than compromise either way.
Well of course he disagrees. If I was CEO, I wouldn't be for it either. Converge two of the hottest selling products my company owns and effectively cut sales in half? No way!
I'm just saying, it's a good idea if it was done right (like I stated in my previous post) with no tradeoffs. We all know Apple could do it, Jony Ive is a bloody genius. There's no doubt in my mind it would be beautiful and flawless. But the issue here isn't engineering, it's the economics.
The real only issue I could see is how it'd only be viable for the 11in MBA... a 13in tablet is just way too big haha. But no doubt, a thinner and light iPad would have to be released first before it could ever find itself as the screen of an MBA.
I wanted this back in 2006.
Then from 2007.
Now I'm quite happy with how the iPad turned out myself.
B
Then from 2007.
It's interesting to see how some of Apple's recent products are somewhere "between", e.g. theTV, which isn't quite an iPod, nor a Mac. So much so that they offer it for sale in both the refurb iPod store and refurb Mac store. The iPod Touch is more than an iPod, but really mich less than a Mac (unless hacked).
Thus, I imagine that if Apple really introduces a "tablet Mac" that it won't really be a full fledged Mac, but more a web browsing/media playing non-general purpose computing device, like an iPod Touch, but larger.
(I'd like one about the size of a trade paperback/small hardbound book and with 720p or greater resolution please!).
Now I'm quite happy with how the iPad turned out myself.
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Sure, why not? Other companies are doing the laptop-tablet combination fairly decently. There are some pretty nice keyboards out there for the iPad already that help push the whole idea along. We're all fans of Apple for their design and integration ideals (among others, of course), so why is it so hard to believe that a company with virtually an infinite amount of money (at least enough to fully research and fund such an idea) and some of the most talented industrial designers and engineers can pull it off?We do?
I'm not saying it would be easy, or even the first version would be perfect (reference: iPhone generation 1, iPad generation 1, and MacBook Air generation 1), but it's definitely not some unachievable feat.
But nonetheless, I don't see it actually ever happening, unfortunately.
They're doing it fairly decently, BUT--is anyone buying them? For the small subset of people who want a convertible iPad/MacBook hybrid, go get a bluetooth keyboard. Problem solved.
How is that problem solved? The point is to combine the two without tradeoffs. An iPad can't run OSX, Windows, Microsoft Office, any of my engineering programs (Cadence, LTSpice, FPGA Advantage, MATLAB, etc), utilize USB peripherals, or even multitask in work flow sort of manner. And an MBA isn't as ideal for perusing the interwebz, reading books, playing touchscreen games, connecting to 3G/4G/LTE, having 10 hours of battery life, or doing anything else the iPad excels at. But melding the two together? Sweet harmony.
I mean, seriously, were all you naysayers against putting cameras in phones? Having phones with internet capabilities? Text massaging? Was there really a downside to converging phones/pages/cameras/gps devices/compasses/voice recorders? Sounds like you're all neo-luddites lol
Oh, and as for if anyone is buying them, yes... they're selling. They wouldn't keep making them if they weren't. Besides, you could have that same argument with Android tablets in general. iPad dominates the market, but that doesn't mean Android devices aren't selling. Consequently, a hybrid device is already fighting an uphill battle if it doesn't have an Apple logo on it.
Knowing and speculating are two different things, though. We all may think/believe/hope Apple could do it (although, I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn't even go that far), but we don't know they could do it.
How?
The features of one take away from the other. It's the classic engineering tradeoff.
In order to support desktop apps and OSes, you need the presence of a power-hungry Intel based processor. To get the battery life of the iPad you need an ARM.
Fix it.
B
Your points are bogus. There's a difference between taking a phone and expanding its capabilities to be a multi-use device, and taking one kind of multi-use device and turning it into another kind of multi-use device. There's no more sense in turning an iPad into a laptop than there is to add a phone to it. The entire point of a tablet is to be an alternative to a notebook. Why would one want to turn it into a notebook?
Yeah... Intel in the keyboard, ARM in the 'screen'... which is why it would be awesome. I thought this was obvious? An iPad in its entirety as the screen, and the literal Macbook Air hardware in the keyboard. That's what I was assuming we were talking about all along
I think it's your rebuttal that's bogus. Present day smartphones are the product of melding multiple products together. It was more of adding the phone capability to a PDA, so your point is moot.
And maybe your entire point of a owning tablet is to be an alternative to a notebook, but it's not everyone's. There's no reason they can't go hand in hand. I'm not suggesting turning the tablet into a notebook as you suggest, simply providing the option of giving it extra notebook like capabilities, without taking away any of its tablet functionality.
I'm shooting for a utopic device. Obviously we're very unlikely to see one, but I really just can't understand why people are so against the option of having an add-on keyboard that makes it support a full-blown OS with great additional hardware and connectability to boot. I mean, do you consider connecting your laptop to an external monitor turning it into a desktop? That seems stupid, right? No... no it doesn't. It's an option, and whether the consumer utilizes it is entirely up to them.
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For me, I'm more upset by the topic saying this is what we want. No we don't. The OP should speak for himself.
I think it is definitely engineering. In a mock up like OP's pictures, there's no downside because it's all just pretty design. However in the actual product, you need to think about the much larger motherboard, much larger chips and heat dissipation.
At the end what we'll probably get is a crappier version of MacBook Air that's thicker, has poorer battery life, slower than the real MacBook Air and more expensive to boot. There's no such thing as no trade off with a hybrid design like this.
I'm wholeheartedly confused as to what people think may change so much. There's virtually nothing else in the current MBA screen/lid aside from the LCD and the camera (and some small/thin wires/circuity here and there). Everything that makes the MBA is essentially in the 'keyboard' (the base).
All I, and presumably others, want is to simply replace the screen with an iPad. Obviously, not as easy as it sounds, but there doesn't have to be the such drastic tradeoffs you suggest. All you'd really need is some sort of dock connection that allows the keyboard (the MBA part, essentially) to utilize the iPad as a screen. Both would have their own separate batteries, both their own separate CPU/GPU, both their own storage. Ideally, you'd be able to somehow utilize the cellular antenna from the iPad (which you can already do through tethering, but perhaps a direct connection), as well as transfer files between storages devices (which I think can be done to an extent through Wi-Fi syncing), and share battery power (which can also already be done by simply plugging the iPad into your laptop via USB, though that's only one-way).
The iPad already has a camera (and one on the back to boot), so it'd be a good candidate as long as it slimmed down and lost some weight (which each subsequent revision will hopefully do). So essentially, it'd be exactly like a Macbook Air with no poorer, and possibly even better, battery life and equal performance with the extra expandability of a tablet with iOS.
I would agree, though, that it'd probably be more expensive.
The "screen" will have to be just as thick as an iPad and the "keyboard" part would be just as thick as the lower part of the current MacBook Air except there'll be extra compromise on both parts to adopt the docking mechanism. When the Intel part is working, the ARM part will be sleeping and vice-versa. I just don't see what's so great about it.
And it'll be much less suitable as a laptop because of the added complexity and weaker hinge mechanism, extra weight and thickness. It'll be a much less elegant version of MacBook Air when docked, and the iPad screen will cost more than the actual iPad.
The bottom line is you're getting a crappier notebook for the "synergy" but there's too little synergy to be gained by combining the two products with two very different CPU architectures because essentially you'll be wasting one part when the other part is working.